For Tang Xiya , it had been like this for years. Slipping in and out of a fragile consciousness, each time hoping that the darkness that greeted her would be the eternal kind.
Each time she swam to the surface, she was met with the same crushing reality: she was still trapped in the rotting shell of her body, still suffering, still denied the death she so desperately craved.
The first thing to return was a sensation. Not the blessed numbness of death, but a raw, screaming nerve-end of agony.
It was a distant throb at first, a wrongness buried deep in the marrow of her being. Tang Xiya tried to cling to the void, to the nothingness that had promised an end to the pain, but it was slipping away.
The cold seeped through her thin hospital dress into her skin from the steel table beneath her.
The air hung thick with the cloying sweet-rot stench of her own necrotic flesh and the acidic tang of industrial disinfectant that failed to mask it.
A faint, skittering movement traced a path up her arm. Maggots. Feasting. She lacked the strength to even shudder.
This was her end. Not a bang, not a whimper, but the silent, ignoble consumption of her body by vermin in a forgotten lab. A failure to the last breath.
Then, it came.
Not a sound, but a pressure.
A tectonic shift deep within her soul, a fault line groaning under a strain it was never meant to bear. Something was breaking.
It started as a single, searing image behind her eyelids: a splash of violet blood on white marble. It was so vivid, so alien, that a fractured gasp escaped her cracked lips. The image was gone as quickly as it came, leaving a phantom ache in her chest.
The pressure built. The air in the lab grew heavy, charged with a static that hummed against her skin. Her heart, which had been slowing to a stop, gave a painful, jerking thump.
Another image, this one accompanied by a sound: the ringing shatter of a nation breaking. It was the sound of screaming, of swords clashing, of a throne room collapsing. It was the sound of her name being cursed by a thousand voices.
'No...' The thought was a weak protest, a child's hand against a tsunami.
The dam shattered.
It was not a memory. It was an avalanche. It was drowning.
She was Tang Xiya. Princess of the Violet Clan. And she was drowning in the consequences of her own catastrophic foolishness.
A sensation of falling, of a strong pair of arms shoving her through a tearing, blinding rift.
Li Chen.
The last act of their powerful Emperor. His face, etched not with anger, but with a devastating, loving despair as he sacrificed everything to throw her to safety. The love in his eyes was a physical wound, more painful than any scalpel the lab had used.
The guilt was next.
It didn't just fill her; it became her. It was a molten lead poured into the hollows of her bones. She had trusted the honeyed words of a man who painted himself her ally, only to see his smile twist into a vicious smirk as he revealed the enslavement charms.
Her naivety had been the key that unlocked the chains for her entire clan. Her people, her beautiful, powerful people, dragged away in chains, their violet blood—a sacred gift, a source of life—now a commodity to be harvested.
She felt their fear. She heard their cries. They were a symphony of her failure, playing on a loop inside her skull.
The face of the man she thought she loved morphed, his features melting and reforming. It became the cold, clinical faces of the scientists here in the lab, their eyes devoid of anything but curiosity as they took samples of her diluted, Earth-born blood, marveling at its faint healing properties.
The same curiosity. The same greed.
And then, she saw it.
The symbol.
Etched onto a ring on the traitor's finger in her memory. Emblazoned on a report folder left on a lab desk here. The same twisting, serpent-like design.
The mark of the cult.
The same evil. It had followed her. It had found her. It had tortured her across two lifetimes. It wasn't just her failure. It was a cancer, a blight that consumed worlds.
A sound tore from her throat, a raw, ragged thing that was part sob, part scream, but mostly pure, undiluted agony. It was the sound of a soul being flayed alive by the truth.
Her body was weak to begin with and coupled with the pain that tore through her chest, Tang Xiya felt life quickly escaping from her body. The grief poured out in a flood of uncontrollable tears.
The weight of it was infinite. She had not just failed a nation. She had unleashed a parasite upon the cosmos, and her second life had been just as meaningless, just as easily snuffed out.
The void called to her again. The sweet, silent oblivion. It would be so easy to let go, to finally stop the pain.
But a new emotion ignited in the ashes of her despair. It was small, a single ember in a frozen wasteland, but it burned with an intensity that dwarfed the pain.
Rage!
A pure, incandescent fury that was aimed at the cult, at the traitors, but most of all, at herself.
This could not be the end!
This would not be the end. She would not grant them the satisfaction of her silent disappearance!
As if her defiance had been a signal, a light manifested in the darkness of the lab. It was cold, blue, and geometric, forming lines of text in the air before her dying eyes.
**[Karmic Debt Assessed:
Catastrophic.
Soul Signature Verified: Tang Xiya of the Violet Bloodline.
Offer Extended: Atonement Cycle.]**
The words held no emotion, only a stark, terrifying finality.
She had nothing left. No hope, no strength, no future. Only this burning ember of rage and a bottomless well of guilt.
With the last vestige of her will, she did not speak it. She thought it, pouring every ounce of her pain, her fury, and her desperate, screaming need for another chance into a single, silent answer.
_Yes._
The light flared, consuming the darkness, the lab, the pain, and her.
Outside the building, the rain was getting heavier and soon the drizzle turned into a storm.
A purple lightning struck across the sky brightening the entire area. The brightness disappeared within a second, and the sky was swallowed by darkness. The sound of thundering arose and it seemed as if the entire earth was shivering.
The wind seemed to be roaring, as if singing an elegy for someone's impending death.
The first life of Princess Tang Xiya ended in failure.
The second life of Tang Xiya ended in betrayal.
Her third journey was about to begin. It would be built on vengeance!